1. Technical Field
The present invention generally relates to hypertext portals and portlets. Specifically, the present invention provides a portlet data sharing system, method, and program product that allows increased flexibility and reusability in sharing data between portlets and portals.
2. Description of Related Art
A portal or portal program is a web-based or hypertext based application that provides personalization, content aggregation from different sources, provides formatting and other presentation layer features, and, optionally may provide a single sign-on as needed for accessing disparate web services. A portal server may be the combined software, hardware and client data that delivers data to users.
As the use of the Internet becomes more pervasive, better technology is constantly being developed for displaying web content. To this extent, portal servers have become the technology of choice in delivering web content to users. Typically, a portal server includes a portal program (e.g., WEBSPHERE from International Business Machines Corp. of Armonk, N.Y.), which arranges web content into a portal page containing one or more portlets.
Portlets are an encapsulation of content and functionality. They are reusable components that combine Web-based content, application functionality and access to resources. Portlets are assembled into portal pages which, in turn, make up a portal implementation. Portlets are similar to Windows applications in that they present their contents in a window-like display on a portal page. Like a Windows application, the portlet window has a title bar which contains controls, allowing the users to expand (maximize) and shrink (minimize) the application.
Each portlet includes a section of web content specified according to a user's preferences. For example, a user can establish his or her own portal page that has portlets for news, weather and sports. Thus a portlet window is the outward manifestation of the portlet program. The portlet program can obtain the desired web content from an appropriate content provider and aggregate the web content. Each portlet coordinates with the portal to generate markup (e.g. HTML) such that web content is displayed in the appropriate portlet windows or subwindows. This portal technology has lead to the explosion of personalized “home pages” for individual web users.
Developers have begun to apply the portlet technology for commercial applications. For example, a portal page can be used to customize a page for an employee, customer, supplier, etc. In these applications, data presented in the portlets is often related. For example, data in a “destination city” field of a travel portlet could be shared with a “target city” field of a weather portlet. In current implementations, a portlet can share data with another known portlet by using messaging or passing parameters. However, the portlet developer must have detailed knowledge of all participating portlets in order to implement the data sharing. Further, the decision of whether to share data, and what data to share is fixed when a portlet is developed. These limitations restrict the reusability and interoperability of portlets.
Prior art methods of sharing and aggregating information to a portal have included, among other protocols, Simple Object Access Protocol (SOAP). SOAP is a way for a program running in one kind of operating system to communicate with a program in the same or another kind of operating system by using preferably the Hypertext Transfer Protocol (HTTP) and its Extensible Markup Language (XML) as the mechanisms for information exchange. SOAP specifies how to encode an HTTP-header and an XML-file so that a program in one computer can call a program in another computer and pass it information. It also specifies how the called program can return a response.
The old ways of adding content may have included using an integrated development environment (IDE), i.e. a programming environment that has been packaged as an application program, typically consisting of a code editor, a compiler, a debugger, and a graphical user interface (GUI) builder. Even before that, integrating content from disparate source could often was a laborious process of editing HTML and adding CGI functionality. In any case, it was laborious, time-consuming, and required specialty knowledge in the semantics and formatting of esoteric languages. This was certainly not a task to be undertaken by the vast majority of people who surf the web for information.
Some progress was made in US Published Application 2002/0169852 A1, SYSTEM AND METHOD FOR DYNAMICALLY INTEGRATING REMOTE PORTLETS INTO PORTALS, IBM. The prior art invention had the laudable goal to provide a simplified procedure for installing, accessing and using remote portlets by portals. Although the prior art had shown a way wherein SOAP and other protocols could support picking portlets from a menu-like interface, and adding such portlets in no particular order to a portal—the prior art neglected to address the modern notion of ad hoc selection of actively rendered portlets at an originating page, and placing such portlets in an accretive manner in the exact tracts of portal window real estate that the user desired.
In view of the foregoing, there exists a need for a portlet data sharing system, method and program product. In particular, there exists a need for a system, method and program product that allows developers to define access to data within a portlet that can be shared with and via a disjoint server. Further, there exists a need for portlets that allow a user or developer to define the data sharing between portlets. These features provide portlets that are more flexible and reusable in various applications.